Jay Cross – 2012’s Top Articles on Working Smarter

The Internet Time Alliance and Jay Cross are magical. I can’t go wrong in following Jay and the troupe at the ITA. Here is Jay’s top articles for 2012. This will make for a great review and a kick start for my 2013 year.Working Smarter Daily points to ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more. These disciplines add up to what I call “working smarter.”

Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines. Every day, Working Smarter Daily uses social signals to select the top articles from blogs in these fields. Here’s how. And here are the top articles from this year:

In networks, cooperation trumps collaboration. Collaboration happens around some kind of plan or structure, while cooperation presumes the freedom of individuals to join and participate. Cooperation is a driver of creativity. Stephen Downes commented here on the differences: collaboration means ‘working together’. cooperation means ’sharing’. MORE >>

( version française ) In recent years I have been working on two major concepts:first, the connectivist theory of online learning, which views learning as anetwork process; and second, the massive open online course, or MOOC, which isan instantiation of that process. These generations span more than a 20-year period. But it didn’t take hold. Web 2.0 MORE >>

Siva Vaidhyanathan [twitter: sivavaid ] has a really well-done (as usual) article that reminds us that for all the excitement about Massive Open Online Courses — which he shares — we still have to figure out how to do them right. There are lots of ways to go wrong. Feel free to stop here.). Hundreds of thousands. MORE >>

An IBM Global CEO Study conducted in 2010 concluded that complexity was the primary challenge emerging out of its conversations with 1,500 CEOs and senior government officials. CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex. CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. MORE >>

I first saw Roger Schank talk in Denver, Colorado, over 25 years ago and have barely disagreed with a word he’s said since. Schank is a critic of the current educational system, pointing to 19 th century curriculum, teaching by telling, lectures, memorisation and standardised tests, as structures and techniques that distort learning. 1975). 1982a). MORE >>